Chris Rust

Professor of Higher Education, and Associate Dean (Academic Policy) at Oxford Brookes University

Chris Rust is Professor of Higher Education, and Associate Dean (Academic Policy) at Oxford Brookes University. Previously he was Head of the Oxford Centre for Staff and Learning Development, and Deputy Director of the Human Resource Directorate, and has also been Deputy Director for two Centres for Excellence in Teaching and Learning – ASKe, and the Reinvention Centre.
He has researched and published on a wide range of subjects, especially assessment. He is a Senior Fellow of the Staff and Educational Development Association, a Fellow of the RSA and was one of the first 14 Senior Fellows of the UK Higher Education Academy.

On BeJLT by Chris Rust:

Archives

This year, we are celebrating two anniversaries – Brookes’ 150 years as an institution and BeJLT’s more modest 10 years – and we are marking both events in this special edition of BeJLT by publishing invited updates of six of its

Assessment continues to be a major challenge to institutions around the world. A challenge in terms of student satisfaction, a challenge in terms of resourcing (there are few economies of scale in assessment (Gibbs 2006) and a challenge in terms of transparency, reliability and validity to name but a few. One of the major problems is that there are very varied levels of understanding of assessment and its processes among stakeholders. This is unsurprising given the complex nature of assessment but it causes difficulties and unintended consequences especially when lack of understanding is found among all stakeholder groups: students, staff, management, quality assurance experts, government. If we are going to meet the challenges we face, the assessment literacy (see Price et al, 2012) of all these groups needs to improve.

As detailed in the original BeJLT paper (Price et al 2008) ASKe brought together a group of international assessment experts to envisage a new future for assessment; the result was the ASKe Assessment Manifesto. Through the Manifesto we hoped to stimulate debate across the sector and, by implication, influence ways of thinking about and practising assessment. So what happened? This paper will reflect on the impact of the Manifesto both locally and in terms of its reach beyond the institution, as well as considering its continued relevance.